MSI Vortex G65 Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
MSI's compact, cylindrical gaming tower packs more muscle than most machines three times its size. If you're looking for a semi-portable system for VR and general gaming, it will serve you well, but it's extremely expensive. Read More…

What We Liked…

Impressive gaming performance for such a small system

RGB external lighting

What We Didn’t…

Very expensive, given the component mix

No front or top-mounted ports

Limited, complicated upgrade options

MSI Vortex G65 Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

The traditional desktop tower is a good "fit" for many enthusiasts and gamers—in every sense of the word. It has room for a wide assortment of parts, and it's easily upgradable, for when you need to add more capabilities (say, more storage, or a faster graphics card or CPU) down the road.

But the cold, hard fact is that many users never upgrade their desktops, and plenty of people prefer compact, space-saving designs (and portability) over ease of upgradability. Hence the shift from desktops to laptops, and then from thicker, heavier laptops that are easy to pop open to add a drive or RAM, to slimmer, lighter, sealed devices like Samsung's recent, under-2-pound Notebook 9. Even on the gaming-desktop front, much of the focus in recent years has shifted to compact designs, like the set-top-box-style Alienware Alpha and Zotac Zbox Magnus, though big, bold gaming towers certainly persist, as we saw most recently with the hulking Acer Predator G6.

But it's rare to find the kind of gaming grunt that you need for 4K gaming in a truly compact desktop. That's what MSI is aiming for with the Vortex G65, a decidedly Apple Mac Pro-esque cylindrical system that stands just 10.6 inches tall by about 7 inches wide. It packs in not just a top-end Intel 6th-Generation Core i7 "Skylake" CPU, but two desktop-class Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics chips in SLI. Supplementing that is a pair of extremely fast, NVMe-equipped SSDs in RAID 0 (for read speeds in excess of 3 gigabytes per second) and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. This is a level of hardware that's typically found in gaming rigs three to four times this system's size.

The MSI Vortex is a superb feat of engineering, without a doubt. And if cost is of far less consequence than physical space, it's an impressive pint-size (6.5 liter-size, to be precise) performer that's well suited to the emerging virtual-reality (VR) realm, if paired with an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive.

Just know that you're paying a whole lot for that space savings. The model we tested was selling for a grimace-inducing $3,999 at this writing, though a $2,199 Vortex model is also available, with a twin set of lesser GeForce GTX 960 graphics cards in SLI. Also, if 4K gaming at the highest possible settings is your aim in buying a gaming system, you should probably invest in something that, while larger than the Vortex, has more room for higher-end graphics cards. That's because the Vortex's dual GTX 980s, as we'll see in our benchmark testing, only skirt the edges of smooth performance at extreme settings on some of today's most demanding titles. And for $4,000, you probably want to do more than "just good enough."

Design & Connectivity

Let's get this out of the way up front: There's no denying that the Vortex bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple's similarly cylindrical Mac Pro. And the Vortex's cooling scheme, in which cool air is pulled in at the bottom, passing through the system to be pushed out the top by a single large fan, is similar to Apple's design, as well. But the Mac Pro isn't built for gaming, while the Vortex most certainly is.

To that end, the Vortex's exterior design is aimed at gamers, with aggressive angles and a complex, asymmetrical five-zone lighting system. The latter lets you chose separate colors for strips that run along the front right, the top, the two rear edges, and the accent-mark-shaped power button. The overall visual effect is certainly unique, especially if you choose different colors for each section, but it won't appeal to those who prefer symmetry or otherwise understated design.

MSI's Dragon Center software, though, does let you adjust the lighting easily (check under the Lighting Wizard tab), allowing you to select any number of colors for each section, and options for making the lights glow constantly, fade in and out ("breathing"), or flash. You can also turn the lighting wholly off. In addition, an iOS and Android Dragon Dashboard app lets you adjust the lighting, cooling, and other settings via your phone or tablet, provided the two devices are connected to the same network. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the app to connect to the Vortex, most likely due to the complications of our corporate office network.

MSI has opted not to place any ports on the front, where they would certainly be handy for plugging in an external drive, a USB key, or the occasional-use peripheral, though there is an interesting collection of connectivity around back.

Before we get to the ports, though, it's worth pointing out some of the design elements at the back. Here, things look more symmetrical, with light strips on each side and a big, backlit MSI dragon logo behind a grille. The design elements here are welcome, but they seem like they would be better suited to the front of the Vortex, rather than hidden around back.

The ample port selection starts at the top with digital (S/PDIF) and analog audio jacks. (Again, a front headphone jack would have been handy.) Four USB 3.0 jacks occupy the section below the audio jacks, with ample spacing between them for bulky cables or flash drives.

Dual HDMI and Gigabit Ethernet jacks sit below the blue USB ports, and the Vortex is well equipped (arguably over-equipped) for gaming-focused network connectivity, with two Killer E2400 chips for wired connections and a Killer Wireless-AC 1535 wireless chip. The latter supports Multi-User MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) for more efficient data to all the devices in your house. Of course, your AC router and the other devices in your house will need to be MIMO-compatible to take advantage of the increased efficiency, and it's unlikely most homes are quite there yet. But when you're spending this much dosh on a system that should serve you well for more than a few years, it's nice to know that the network connectivity is cutting-edge.

Hidden beneath the Ethernet jacks is yet another row of ports, which are rather hard to reach without tipping the system forward. Two reversible USB Type-C ports that also support Thunderbolt 3 live here (see our explainer story The Basics: USB 3.1 and USB Type-C), as do two mini-DisplayPorts.

The Vortex technically supports six-screen gaming, though you'll have to mix and match video connections among DisplayPort, HDMI, and Thunderbolt, so choose your monitors carefully if that's your aim. But for gaming purposes, at least, you'll probably want to stick to one 4K display, anyway. As we'll see later in testing, 4K is about the limit of this system's gaming abilities, unless you're willing to dial down your in-game settings closer to the medium range than high.

Below the last row of ports, nearly hidden from view when the system sits on a desk, is the standard three-prong jack for the power supply. The supply itself is nestled in the center of the system, between the tightly packed components, which we'll take a closer look at in the next section.

One note before we leave the Vortex's connectivity section: We ran into a very odd and specific issue when testing our review unit. The two blue USB ports on the left (when looking at the system from the back) refused to properly recognize three external solid-state drives (SSDs) that we often use for installing benchmarks (specifically, Samsung's Portable SSD T3, SanDisk's Extreme 500, and Lexar's Portable SSD). Interestingly, when we plugged in any of those drives to either of the two blue ports on the right side of the panel, the drives functioned normally. And everything else we plugged into any of the four USB 3.0 ports worked just fine, including flash drives, peripherals, and a couple of portable hard drives (with spinning drive platters, rather than the SSDs' solid-state components).

We went back and forth with a representative from MSI, who told us they couldn't replicate the issue in their labs. We tried updating the BIOS and doing a system restore, but external SSDs (and only external SSDs) refused to function when connected to the USB ports on the left side. This is an issue we've never experienced before, especially where two ports in the same cluster can't handle a specific kind of hardware, when other ports can. In the end, it seems likely that our test system in particular had a very specific defect.

But even if this issue is shared with other Vortex models, it's not likely one that very many users would notice, given that it cropped up only with external SSDs (at least as far as we can tell). And even if you ran into this issue, you have two other USB Type-A ports to plug drives into that should work just fine. Also, you could plug an adapter into either of the USB Type-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports and run your external drive from either of those. We did so, and our external SSDs ran just fine.

If we ran into this issue with a Vortex we'd purchased, we'd probably send it back for a replacement, mostly because this system costs so much, and we'd expect it to work flawlessly. But if we had to live with it, we could. It's more of a minor annoyance than a problem that can't be worked around fairly easily.

Table of Contents

MSI Vortex G65

Our Verdict:
MSI's compact, cylindrical gaming tower packs more muscle than most machines three times its size. If you're looking for a semi-portable system for VR and general gaming, it will serve you well, but it's extremely expensive.

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